Adidas Stan Smith

Adidas Stan Smith: history of sneakers and men

35 years. It's not the age of the shoe, but the amount of time since Stan Smith retired and left tennis lessons. Without the eponymous shoe model that has become cult today, you probably would never have heard of it.
Stan Smith is a tennis player who won the US Open in 1971 then Wimbledon in 1972 (all the same). This led to his being inducted in 1987 into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, which is a sports museum based in Newport in the United States and whose mission is to consecrate the history of tennis and its champions. In 2005, he was also named one of the 40 best players of all time by Tennis Magazine.
While he was very popular in the 1970s thanks to his victories, his popularity exploded when Adidas contacted him to form one of the most successful partnerships in sneaker history. This is how he went from athlete to fashion icon.
To understand the history of the Stan Smith (the shoe), we must go back to their origins and the name that was initially intended for it: the Adidas Robert Haillet.
The brand with the three stripes produced its first shoes for tennis courts in the early 1960s. The person at the helm was Horst Dassler, the son of brand founder Adolph “Adi” Dassler (from whom the name Adidas derives), who had the idea for this sneaker. An idea that would do nothing less than revolutionize the history of tennis shoes. Horst Dassler had the idea of ​​producing the first shoe made of leather, while the models of the time were made of canvas. The new shoe featured a rubber outsole and a synthetic insole.